1998–2001: How we survived the turn of the millennium, and made new music.
Remember Y2K? At the turn of the millennium, the world was supposed to end. Instead, we made new music. Here’s how it all went down.
The 1990s was the greatest era in the history of modern popular music. By the end of the decade, many musicians who were already household names, reached a creative peak that reinvented their careers, and introduced new genres.
The naughty nineties gave us new jack swing, merged gospel choirs with pop, mainstreamed pop-rock and crystallized a pure strain of R&B that will never be matched again.
Great as the 90s were, they had to end, and they went out with a bang. Here’s how the artists and their albums kept us talking, and dancing, from the evening years of the last millennium until the lights went out, and the 2000s were born.
The millennium pivot era from about 1998 to about 2001 was a period of cosmic turmoil. Everybody was afraid of the impending Y2K bug: an ominous digital bomb that was supposed to suddenly wipe out our civilization on the night of New Year’s Eve. We were all gripping the edge of our seats, in nail biting, no popcorn reality: would it happen, or would it not? People were actually making plans to save whatever data they had amassed at a time when the internet was relatively young. Flash drives & floppy disks sold like hot cake, but cloud storage was still in the future.
In that pivotal maelstrom of unpredictability, many big name musical artists were on the verge of something new. Many had been in limbo for a few years, in myriad journeys of self rediscovery and identity experiments. New sounds were rippling out of the formless metaverse at ionic speeds, and all of them were heavy with computer symbolism. The human race was obsessed with electronic spirituality.
Madonna, the ever-changing Queen of her own fiefdom, may have spearheaded the revolution in 1998, with Ray of Light. It sounded nothing like the Madonna we knew. It was strange & evidently spiritual. We were hypnotized by her trance like new sound, literally frozen, and everybody called it a smash hit. The media heralded the album as a comeback. Ray of Light swept the award circuits clean that year.
Speaking of revolutions, the cosmic change swept through other genres: including gospel, or what was left of it, by the time missionary maestro Kirk Franklin was done with it. We were still reeling from the genre-transforming Stomp, released in 1997, which introduced us to an infectious urban dance gospel. Not done, Kirk was back the following year with an unprecedented crossover collaboration between gospel and secular acts, including Bono & R.Kelly. Lean on me swept every award possible in its categories. I’ll never forget a random sing along that reverberated campus wide one evening, from hall to hall. Kirk Franklin’s moment was a global cultural revolution.
The revolution was going on elsewhere, and the music on Maxwell’s Embrya was evidently otherworldly. It must have come to him in a dream, or as he says on the track cococure, from a high. In a genre already awash with heady talent, Maxwell reinvented neosoul with the unearthly sounds of 1998’s Embrya. So influential was he, that when I first heard Michael Jackson’s Butterflies 3 years later, I was sure Maxwell was the inspiration. Butterflies was a flawless track, and a new high for a musician with more highs than any other. The song was featured on Jackson’s Invincible album. Started since 1997, release dates for Invincible had been pushed forward since 1999. Like every other artist who came back over the millennium, Michael Jackson created a comeback that sounded nothing like himself. Till this day, 20 years later, Invincible still sounds futuristic. As a result of battles against his record company over the transfer of his rights, and his ownership of the most priced asset in the kingdom of music: the Sony ATV catalog, Invincible became Jackson’s most critically derided album. Though the company didn’t even dignify the album with promotional or commercial singles, or short films, or concert tours, and the album was subsequently panned, the neosoul Butterflies managed it’s way up to number 2 on the billboard hot 100, on the strength of its mystique alone. And in 2009, Invincible was voted by online readers of Billboard as the best album of its decade.
The review of the millennium would be incomplete without the hip hop impresario who shattered double glass ceilings for genre & gender. In 1998, Ms. Lauryn Hill swept more Grammies than anyone in history except Michael Jackson himself, with The Miseducation. And, though we all survived the Y2K doomsday prediction, Lauryn Hill’s one and only studio album will be a classic till world’s end, whenever that happens.
The turn of the millennium also gave us Destiny’s Child, from The Writing’s on the Wall (1999) to Survivor (2001), when the world was introduced to Beyoncé. Meanwhile, Dru hill & Sisqo’s thong-tho-tho-tho-thong & dragon entries reorchestrated R&B to fever pitch.
The era also belongs to music videos, such as those from Destiny’s Child, then Janet Jackson and Busta Rhymes on 1999’s What’s it Gonna Be, and everything Missy Elliot did from 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly era through All in my grill, Get ur freak on and of course, Work it, by 2002. One word for all the music videos of the millennium era: director Hype Williams.
And if you’re looking for music producers, the Y2K era crowned both Timbaland and Darkchild. The end of the millennium exposed us to the wizardry of R Kelly , from 1995’s I believe I can fly to If I could turn back time (1998), I wish and The Storm is over now (2000), even though the pied piper of R&B is notorious for other news now.
It was the millennium of the trinity of vocal powerhouses: Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston: from 1997’s My Heart Will Go On to My Love is Your Love and When You Believe (1998), never was there another time when the crown for the ‘voice’ was more up for grabs.
The list of artists, and albums who made new sounds while the millennium died and rose again will go and on, like Celine Dion suggested: let’s not forget the non-Americans, whose sounds made global impact but were subdued on the award circuit: Craig David comes to mind, as well as Lighthouse Family and Spice Girls.
The turn of the millennium was a truly global phenomenon. It was a moment when anything was possible, and everybody felt it. The world was supposed to end, but we made it, and we made new music.
The world hasn’t been the same since, especially with the actual catastrophe that struck on September 11, just when we thought it was safe to get back in the water of the new millennium. We are presently adrift in a catastrophic pandemic that has redefined history as we know it. Time to look back at other times when we were deeply afraid, and what good music we made out of it.
